NEW DELHI: Seventy year old Sudini Kaur lives in a ghetto of heartbroken women, haunted by horrifying, sickening images of the night of carnage five years ago that took her son, three grandsons and her zest for life.
“We hid and hid and hid, until we could hide no more,” she said. “They searched everywhere until they found us.”
The men in Sudini Kaur’s family were among the thousands officially 2,733 but by some estimates perhaps 5,000 Sikh men and boys who were bludgeoned, slashed and burned to death by mobs in the days after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Sikh bodyguards on October 31, 1984.
Two Sikh men have been hanged and others are still under investigation in Indira Gandhi’s death. Indian officials portray the killing as part of a conspiracy among Sikhs, a religiou group that dominates the prosperous state of Punjab and in whose name a separatist war is being fought there.
Only One Prosecution
But except for one case, brought by a woman with pictures of her relatives’ assailants, there have been no prosecutions of the killers of the Sikh men from modest homes in outlying neighborhoods whose possessions were looted and wives molested as the men were killed. Most of the victims were migrants from Rajasthan poor artisans with no links to the Punjab’s agrarian people.
There have also been no comprehensive official investigations into charges that the attacks were. politically motivated, a source of continuing grief and anger among Sikh leaders.
Reporters who visited the looted and divested neighborhoods before the Government trucked away the charred bodies in the early days of November 1984 were told again and again by stunned survivors that the men who came in organized gangs were being directed by leaders of the ruling Congress Party. In five years the survivors, and several Indian human rights groups trying to help them get justice, have never wavered in that belief, despite official Government reports that have sought to obtain that issue, Sikhs say.
At least 450 affidavits were collected after the 1984 riots. Three politically prominent names figure in many of the descriptions by witnesses charging incitement. Two of the men, city ward leaders for the ruling party, are now Cabinet members serving Indira Gandhi’s son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The third is a party official.
The issue of the 1984 anti— ‘Sikh riots is in the news again in India because Rajiv Gandhi, who was elected to a five year term as Prime Minister in the wave of sympathy that followed his mother’s assassination faces a reelection challenge at the end of the year. Images of Indira Gandhi’s death being invoked by the Congress Party stir up other memories among the Sikhs.
“I realized for the first time what it was to a Jew in Nazi Germany,” the writer and Sikh historian Kushwant Singh said in an interview.
When what he calls the “lumpen” mobs came for Mr. Singhall ‘Sikhs use Singh, meaning lion, as part of their names he was rescued by the Swedish Embassy compound in a diplomatic car.
“I could understand what the Jews must have felt, to be a refugee in your own home country,” he said.
Mr. Singh said that in the intervening years a new phenomenon has arisen among Sikhs. Insecure in an environment in which they believe they are regarded as a “race of traitors,” they
have begun moving together into “mohallas,” closed communities often near large Sikh temples called gurdwaras,
Sudini Kaur, whose home was once in Trilokpuniy, across the Jamuna River from Delhi proper, now lives in a resettlement site in the West Delhi neighborhood of Tilak Vihar, along with more than a thousand other widows and thousands of bereaved children, mothers and sisters.
Nearly all the women who lost their husbands and means of support in the November 1984 killings were given one room apartments by the Delhi city authorities, along with monetary compensation totaling about $1,220 for loss of property.
In addition, Sikhs from around the world sent aid worth up to about $55,000 although an emergency shipment of blankets for the Delhi winter was tied up six months by Indian customs until the matter was raised in Parliament. By then it was summer.
Sikh foundations tried to give aid intended to create income generating skills. But the women of Tilak Vihar, and an adjoining slum of mud huts housing more displaced families, were unskilled and unaccustomed to holding formal jobs. They also have children to care for, which limits their mobility.
One afternoon last week, a group of them gathered on the two beds that nearly fill Shami Kaur’s oneroom home, where she and eight children and one grandchild live, to relieve the horror of Noyember 1984. Shami Kaur, 45, spent three days hiding in a forest after an attack by drunken rioters from a nearby community left her father, son and husband dead. She came out only to beg at the roadside for scraps of food for her children.
A Cup of Tea for Supper
The women reenacted being told at knifepoint: “We will cut off your breasts and send them to Punjab! You have killed our mother, Indira!”
Saduri Kaur, 60, who saw her three sons killed, leaving her 18 grandchildren, is consumed with anxiety that no one will marry her eight granddaughters because she has no money for dowries. She is barely able to keep them alive.
“They get only a cup of tea for supper,” she said.
“Indira Gandhi was India’s mother, and our mother too,” Saduri Kaur said. “We were mouming for her when they came for us. We voted for her. But Indira Gandhi has taken our children.”
(From the New York Times)
Article extracted from this publication >> September 22, 1989
